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Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity, film and the transition from dictatorship

2005; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13545710500188361

1469-9583

Ruth Ben‐Ghiat,

European history and politics

Abstract This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts. Keywords: MasculinityviolencewarfascismItalian film Notes An important contribution in this regard is Torriglia (Citation2002); see also Duggan (Citation1995). African-American soldiers are represented in this manner in Luigi Zampa's 1946 Vivere in pace, in the Naples episode of Roberto Rossellini's 1946 Paisà and in Alberto Lattuada's 1948 Senza pietà. On Italian attitudes towards these unions and the mixed-race babies that sometimes resulted from them, see Moe (Citation1997). In Bicycle Thieves, the father – son gazes, which are so well analyzed by Marcus (Citation1986: 54 – 75), makes this ‘visual exchange’ explicit, as does De Sica's 1942 I bambini ci guardano (The Children are Watching Us), but De Sica's Sciuscià and Mario Soldati's 1945 Fuga in Francia are also important in this regard. On the difficult reentry of returned soldiers, see Pavone (Citation1985); Rinauro (Citation1998); Lorenzon (Citation2001), and Bistarelli (Citation1992). All quotes are from Critica fascista: Cesare Zavoli, ‘Spirito della modernità fascista’, 1 January 1941; Giuseppe Maggiore, ‘Odiare il nemico’, 1 March 1942. See also Ferdinando Loffredo, ‘Nuovi caratteri del soldato italiano’, 15 September 1940, and ‘Noi, popolo italiano’, 15 January 1941. Memoirs that link fascist squadrism with an antidisciplinarian body politics include Marcello Gallian, Comando di tappa (Rome: Cabala, 1934); and Ottone Rosai, Dentro la guerra (Rome: Quaderni di Novissima, 1934). For squadrism's enduring attraction, see Wanrooij (Citation2001); and La Rovere (Citation2003). For Grano and Montini charges, see, respectively, Archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (hereafter UNWCC), PAG-3/2.0, Reel no. 11, Reg. 4712/Gr/It/53, microfilm p. 1423, and UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, Reel no.11, Reg.7638/Gr/It/1114, microfilm p. 1719. Since charge numbers can vary confusingly in format as recorded by UNWCC functionaries, I have given the registered number for each charge listed as well as microfilm reel and page numbers. See also Santarelli (Citation2004). Quote from letter of 25 February 1946, made in reference to Grano's assault on Plagos, by D. Kioussopoulos, listed as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg. no. 4712/Gr/It/53, microfilm p. 1425. The major difference is in the scope of brutalities, with Jews also included in the German round-ups and persecutions. Many more public hangings are also found in charges against Germans. Finally, the Nazis also tended to be more ‘thorough’ in their reprisal killings and massacres, sometimes killing unborn children of pregnant women to make sure there were no survivors. See the accounts of atrocities in UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, Reel 11, reg. no. 3881/Gr/G/33, microfilm pp. 0452 – 3, and reg no. 4347/Gr/G/53, microfilm p. 0554. See UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0: reg. no 4549/Gr/It/33, microfilm p. 1328; reg. no. 4553/Gr/It/37, microfilm p. 1348; see also reg. no 4553/gr/it/37, microfilm p. 1348; reg. no. 6804/Gr/It/76, microfilm p. 1539; and 7275/Gr/It/95, microfilm p. 1624. Examples are drawn from account of reported rapes; but since rape victims were often stigmatized and punished, it is probable that (as in every situation of wartime occupation) many others were not recorded. See UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg no. 4551/Gr/It/35, microfilm p. 1340, which alleges that Lieutenant Gaio Gradenigo, a commanding officer of a disarmament unit in Kastorià, made a priest masturbate in front of Italian soldiers and Greek civilians, and pumped air into Greek mens' rectums to get them to surrender arms; also reg. no. 7054/Gr/It/88, microfilm 1589. On 5 May 1943, under a mixed command of officers from the Italian Army, Carabinieri, and the Italian Police, Italians looted and burned hundreds of houses in the Greek village of Davlia. As ten witnesses asserted, ‘at the same time the Italians were beating, torturing, and killing the terrorized inhabitants a number of whom were carried away as hostages' UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg. no. 3771/Gr/It/2, microfilm p. 1188. An example is the episode reported by eye-witnesses that occurred on 23 July 1942 near Ljubljana. As a reprisal for the killing of an Italian soldier the village of Brdo was destroyed. Two female and ten male villagers were executed and their corpses placed on an open military lorry along with the carcass of a pig. A mixed group of fascist militiamen and Army grenadiers sat on the corpses and sang fascist songs as they drove the lorry through the streets of Ljubljana. The bodies were then buried in a common grave, and the Italians sang ‘dirty songs’ as they arranged the male and female corpses in lewd positions. See UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg. no 364/Y/It/11, Appendix 24, microfilm pp. 1108 – 9. For war crimes in Yugoslavia, see Burgwyn (Citation2004). UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg. no. 322/Y/It/5, microfilm p. 0972. Diaries, memoirs, and oral testimonies pose many interpretative problems and raise questions about the relations between individual and social memory. See Winter and Sivan (Citation1999: 6 – 39) and Bourke (Citation2004); and, for the Italian case, Bendotti (Citation1992), Labanca (Citation2000), Lorenzon (Citation2001) and Rochat (Citation1985). Over one million Italians consigned their arms to the Germans after the Armistice, and over 6,000 were killed between September and November 1943 in Italian – German clashes during the phase of disarmament. For a succinct overview of this situation see Schreiber (Citation1992), esp. pp. 31 – 46. Cantaluppi had become active in the Resistance immediately after the Armistice. At the time of his arrest by the German SS in November 1944, he formed part of Committee for National Liberation in Verona. The German psychoanalyst Tilmann Moser, who has worked with children of Nazi soldiers, discusses the sexualization of mother – son relationships when fathers were away at the front. Jerome (Citation2001: esp. 58). The absence of adequate assistance is a theme that recurs in many immediate postwar testimonies and in those gathered years later: see also Labanca (Citation2000) and Procacci and Bertucelli (Citation2001). As Camerini (Citation1982: 4) relates, Lattuada admired in particular Howard Hawks, John Ford, Jean Renoir, F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. As Camerini (Citation1982: 23) has written, Lattuada's ‘search for an expressive functionality adapted to each different situation takes in the most disparate genres, so that the film is constructed of a succession of stylistically self-sufficient narrative blocks’. The importance of the act of listening in the testimonial process is highlighted in Feldman and Laub (Citation1992). Quote from Lan, review in Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera (7 November 1946); also P.S., review in Il Quotidiano (22 February 1946), and G. Sig., review in Film rivista (December 1946). G. Sig, review in Film rivista (December 1946); Emilio C., ‘Briganti Dabbene’, Mercurio (July – August 1946). Adriano Baracco, review in Hollywood (4 November 1946).